It’s fair to say that I’ve been an electronics hobbyist for almost two decades, yet during that expanse of time I’ve never owned a “real” lab bench power supply. At home I got away with wall-warts, ATX supplies, and homebrew … Continue reading →

What did you do last summer? It was kinda a long time ago, right? Well, I did some stuff that I wrote up and never got around to publishing. For me, last summer was the summer of aspirational Volt-Nuttery, which involved … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, over Labor Day weekend, my Canon S100 stopped working. The barrel wouldn’t retract — something ticked rapidly inside for a second and the back panel reported a Lens Error. I tried turning it on while twisting … Continue reading →

Now for something a little different. A couple years ago I heard about the USB-DVB dongles that you could use for software radio, so I picked one up. Of course it sat around in a box until a few weeks … Continue reading →

So I know Xilinx wants everybody to move on to Vivado now, but being wary of new software, I am still using PlanAhead. One very annoying thing about the whole IP core business is figuring out how to roll your … Continue reading →

It’s been a bit quiet here because I screwed up my board and MicroZed. The PS still works but I seem to have blown out parts of the FPGA and maybe the digital side of one ADC. How did this … Continue reading →

I did two arguably dumb things that kept my SPI experience from being smooth sailing. The first was putting in a 3-8 decoder on the slave select lines and assuming there was driver support for it. The second was not … Continue reading →